o live!"

The Lord's gentle word to Jonah was,

"Doest thou well to be angry?"

Jonah went outside the city walls, and made for himself a little house
of the branches of trees and waited to see if the city would be
destroyed. It was very hot and Jonah was deeply troubled, and the
Lord, who is full of love and pity for His children, caused a gourd
vine with large leaves to spring up and grow over the dried branches of
the little house that sheltered Jonah, and he was very glad and
grateful. But the Lord, who always looks upon the heart, saw that the
heart of Jonah was not yet wholly right, and the next morning he
allowed a worm to eat the gourd until it withered. Then the sun beat
down upon Jonah's head until he fainted and wished to die, saying, as
he had said before,

"It is better for me to die than live!"

But the Lord was patient with him, and said,

"Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd?"

And Jonah replied ungraciously,

"I do well to be angry, even unto death."

Then the Lord in his love and pity answered,

"Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not labored,
neither madest it grow; which came up in a night and perished in a
night; and should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are
more than six-score thousand persons that cannot discern between their
right hand and then left hand, and also much cattle?"

Jonah did not know all that was in the mind of the Lord, though he was
a prophet. He did not know that he was one of the signs of the Lord's
first coming, for Jesus spoke of Jonah as a "sign," that as he was
three days and three nights within the great fish "so shall the Son of
man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth."

CHAPTER XXXIV.

ESTHER, THE QUEEN.

About five hundred years before Christ King Ahasuerus (Xerxes) reigned
over Persia. In the third year of his reign he gave a royal feast to
all the princes and nobles of Persia and Medea, in Shushan, the royal
city. It lasted one hundred and eighty days, and was very costly, for
the king wished to show the great men from all his provinces the riches
and glory of his kingdom and of his palace.

At the end of these days he made another feast to all who were in
Shushan, a feast of seven days, and which included great and small.
The palace garden was hung with awnings of white and green and violet,
fastened with cords and silver rings to pillars of marble.

Wine was given to the